Drawings
Of Dance's surviving drawings for the new Gaol at Newgate, 24 (plus an engraving) are in the Soane Museum while the majority (more than 86) are in the care of the Corporation of London Records Office. These include two preliminary designs earlier than the Soane Museum drawings as well as survey, working and contract drawings. Two plans, for example, show the Gaol (and Sessions House) built after the fire of 1766 and adjacent properties on an enlarged site with variant block plans for the new Gaol (no date, c.1768?, Surveyors' Justice Plan, vol.I, Nos 4 and 6, No.6 reproduced Stroud fig.28b).

George Dance the Elder
The elder Dance had prepared designs for rebuilding Newgate Gaol in 1755 (see [SM Vol 172]) for engraved plan, section and west elevation) and a revised design in 1764 (plan and elevation, CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plans, vol.I, No.24) but nothing came of his efforts. His initial design had three courtyards: that for the debtors was on the north side of New Gate (now designed as a triumphal arch) and those for the male and female felons on the south side. Kalman (1969, p.52) describes it as 'strikingly modern in conception [providing] what appears to be the first example of entirely separate quadrangles for the three basic classes of inmates' with day wards heated by large fire-places and individual night cells, and with numerous water basins and lavatories, as well as fountains in the courts. The principal (west) elevation had a massive windowless wall with heavily rusticated blind arches set 12 feet above the ground. The revised design moved the debtors' courtyard to the south end of the site beyond the Sessions House and revised the elevation with blind arches alternating with blind windows and with rusticated quoins.

George Dance the Younger
Nothing more happened until 1767 when Parliament provided £50,000 for a new prison. A Committee for Rebuilding the Gaol of Newgate was formed, first sitting on 4 August 1767, and the elder George Dance was made Surveyor, the younger Dance serving as unpaid Assistant Surveyor. When he succeeded his father as Surveyor to Newgate Gaol on 8 February 1768, he immediately began on designs for the replacement of the building. The Newgate Committee having agreed on 12 February to replace the old Sessions House, thus enlarging and freeing up the site, Dance made preliminary designs (CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plans, vol.1., Nos 24 and 176) before resolving the penultimate design which was presented by 15 April 1768; his scheme included a new Sessions House to the south (see [SM D4/4/10] and [SM D4/4/1] and Newgate Sessions House). A scheme in which the elevations to the Gaol were amended was presented on 8 June and accepted - the Sessions House proposal being formally approved on 9 December 1768. Printed specifications for tenders were issued in April 1769 (copies in the RIBA Library (Early Works) viz. bricklayer's work, carpenter's work, glazier's work, mason's work, painter's work, plasterer's work, plumber's work and smith's work etc) and on 9 and 16 June the building committee examined and selected the tenders, and contract drawings for the Gaol were signed on those two days ([SM D4/4/8] and [SM D4/4/9]). The foundation stone was laid on 31 May 1770. Two years later it was found that Davall the mason was substituting Purbeck-Portland Stone for Portland, then the brickwork contractor was accused of using the wrong sand and then the smith was found to be fraudulent. In September 1773 poor Dance, pleading ill-health, resigned, but quickly recuperating, was reinstated.

By the spring of 1774 the Sessions House was finished and by November 1775 the Gaol was sufficiently complete for some prisoners to be transferred from part of the old prison. Building work continued and on 23 May 1780 Dance was instructed to have the final quadrangle finished immediately. However, the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 6 June 1780 left the Gaol, with the Keeper's House, in ruins and the Sessions House was also damaged by fire.

Rebuilding
Repairs were begun as soon as possible and were completed by July 1785. A plan signed by J.Wyld and dated 20 June 1820 (CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plans No.457) that corresponds to another drawn by T.Bradberry (RIBA Drawings Collection, SE 16/14) and engraved in Britton & Pugin shows that in the rebuilding some modifications were made to the contract plan of 1769 ([SM D4/4/8]). Thus the debtors' courtyard was divided into three parts with an infirmary yard, another for 'Transports & Boys' and another for 'Transports' alone. The larger central courtyard for male felons was subdivided into three yards with one for 'Misdemeanors' and two for 'Untried Prisoners' while the female felons' courtyard was divided between convicted women prisoners and those awaiting trial. However, the opportunity for improving conditions, by, for example, better ventilation was not taken, the emphasis being on increasing security and on economy.

Opinions of the building
The best critique of Newgate is Sir Reginald Blomfield's essay 'The Architects of Newgate' published in his Studies in architecture (1905), written when the building still stood. There was for Blomfield 'nothing quite like it ... a rare and extraordinary effort in architecture'. He contrasted Dance's achievement in giving 'architectural quality [to] a gigantic wall' that was 'about 50 feet high at the southwest angle, diminishing to 43 feet at the northwest, and 300 feet long on the main facade, with no openings whatever except two doors, and the doors and windows of the keeper's house in the centre' with Soane's 'three blind walls for the Bank of England... [that] by a curious inversion of ideas ... including a number of sham doors and window openings...the very architectural feature which the conditions of his problem forbade him to use. Soane's work shows a scholarship and ability, but it is frigid and uninteresting, making no appeal to the emotions, because one feels that Soane shirked the difficulty, and never went to the heart of the matter. He tried the short-cut of the second-rate man, and hoped to disguise the thinness of his invention of his invention by plastering on architectural details....The quality of [Dance's] work lies in the fact that he attacked his problem squarely. He had to build a prison wall, and a prison wall he meant it to be; but his mind, stimulated by a very extraordinary influence [Piranesi's Carceri], so worked on the conditions that he produced what was perhaps the finest abstract expression of wall surface to be found in Western architecture'.

''The elements of Dance's design were very simple. On the principal front the wall surface was divided into three projections and two main recesses. The centre projection was occupied by the keeper's house...; each storey had five semicircular openings for windows, and a door in the centre on the ground floor. The wall space on either side of this central block was set back above the ground floor, and the two main architectural entrances, formidable doorways with grilles and festoons of fetters in the panel above, occupied the space between the centre block and the great flanking masses at the northwest and southwest corners.... The wall surfaces were rusticated up to the plain stone frieze without any architrave, which was surmounted by a modillion cornice and plain blocking course.... So much was done here with so little, and the intellectual level of the architecture, and the quality of hard thought that it displayed, were so high that they fully justified the consensus of opinion which places this building on a different plane from any other of its kind'.

'The detail of the work had much of the abnormal character of the whole design; the monstrous profiles of the mouldings and the curious jointing of the voussoirs of the arch, the spacing of the masonry and the abstinence from everything but the barest essentials of architectural details all show that Dance was driving hard at the expression of an abstract idea.... To attain this result he deliberately turned his back on the ordinary paraphernalia of design, he ignore the orders, he dispensed with carving, he determined to appeal to the emotions by the sheer bulk and proportion of his wall, for the proportions of this design give evidence of very careful thought. Dance seems to have played approximately on one, one and a half, and double squares. The dimensions do not work out exactly, but I think it is clear that he was working on some sort of system... In Newgate Prison, as in most other designs in regular architecture, certain definite relations can be traced between the various parts; for instance, the height from the string course to the frieze was 23 feet, about 1 to 2. The width of the projecting bays was 26 feet, of the recessess between, 38, about 2 to 3. The blocks of stone to the wall below the first string course were 5 feet by 1 foot 8 inches - that is, 1 to 3 - and it would be easy to trace this further. The one weak point in the design was the Governor's house in the centre of the west facade. Here, what we may call "the drawing of the design" was extremely feeble, and the succession of small arched openings was monotonous and insignificant'.

Blomfield concentrated on the design of the exterior omitting discussion of the planning since 'the instincts of the mob of 1780 were sound, for the place with its narrow windows and gloomy years [was]... as hopelessly inhuman as it is possible to imagine, those were the days before prison reform'. Summerson (1963, p.274.) cautioned against over-estimating the influence of Piranesi's 'Carceri series of fantasies published in 1750.... [which] accounts for nothing in the composition or detail of the building.... The composition was, in essence, Neo-classical. It had the true Neo-classical reluctance to emphasise the centre, and consisted, broadly, of two masses with a hollow between them. In this hollow were placed the Governor's house and the two entrance lodges, a trinity of subsidiary features, in a different key to the rest. Again, each of the two lateral masses was itself subdivided to emphasise the ends, not the centre, of each. All this corresponds to the feeling of Dance's Parma design, and indeed the plain rusticated walls of Newgate definitely find their inception here. The handling of the various parts is wonderfully resourceful. The Governor's house, with its close-set windows and busy patterns of rustification, may conceivably be a reminiscence of Vanbrugh.

With more certainty we can trace the arched recesses which relieve the principal masses, for they derive partly from Palladio's Palazzo Thiene and partly from Giulio Romano's work at Mantua - the Palazzo del Té.... the way that Dance succeeded in integrating Giulio Romano with Palladio within a Neo-classical totality forcibly illustrates his unusual power of imagination. The obvious parallel is Ledoux'.

Thus while the architecture parlante aspect of Dance's design for Newgate, that is, the drama of the massing and rustification of its facade, was of lasting importance, functionally, the gaol is seen as much less successful. The accommodation, from which the innovatory ideas of separate night cells was dropped in 1768, nevertheless provided for three classes of prisoners, and had a chapel and an infirmary. Stroud wrote (p.99) that 'by prevailing standards, the internal planning of the blocks was humane and healthy. John Howard's efforts towards reform, embodied in The State of the prisons in England and Wales....1777, had not yet achieved publication and Dance had little but his own sense to guide him. However, a good supply of water, adequate privies, and stoves or fireplaces were the priorities by which the unfortunate inmates counted themselves most blessed'. In developmental terms, Newgate can be seen as sitting 'uncomfortably on the line dividing the reformed and the unreformed' (Evans, 1982, p.109) and the multi-courtyard plan used by Dance was superseded in some other later prisons by the radial plan of Bentham's Panopticon, published in 1791.

Sources
In his analysis of Dance's stylistic sources, Kalman (p.95) wrote that he had drawn upon the Italian 16th century for much of his detail, more from the robust and somewhat irrational migrant Romanism of Giulio Romano than the quieter classicism of Palladio. The remarkable niches are derived from the window of Giulio's own house at Mantua, where aedicules are inserted within rusticated arches. The Mantua frames, however, are comparatively delicate; for heavy rusticated voussoirs beneath arches one must look to Palladio's Palazzo Thiene, a facade inspired, and possibly designed by Giulio himself [H. Burns et al., Andrea Palladio 1508-1580 , catalogue of an exhibition for the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1975, p.36, considers that the ground floor with its voussoirs beneath arches is 'more or less completely Guilio's invention']. Dance has combined the two into a highly sculpturesque unit. Alternate niche-surrounds curve back into the wall, a sophisticated inversion of the doorway used by Wren below the tower of St Mary-le-Bow and repeated by Hawksmoor at St Mary Woolnoth. The five voussoirs force their way into the pediment, another feature found in London Baroque architecture, as at James's church of St George, Hanover Square. The form was derived from Raphael's Palozzo Vidoni-Caferelli in Rome, alterations to which were carried out by Dance's teacher Giansimoni.'

Soane
There are in the Soane Museum two drawings of Newgate made for Soane's lectures at the Royal Academy: a view of the principal front (SM 18/7/8) and a view of the corner of the building fronted by a water pump (not designed by Dance) which was 'drawn by Chantrell / 1813' (SM 18/7/9). Soane declared that 'I think it impossible for any contemplative mind at least, to look on the front of Newgate without shuddering at the gloomy aspect of that masterpiece of art. Gloom is the characteristic mark of a prison and what every artist would wish to stamp on his work' (quoted in Watkin, 1996, p.339). He used only the drawing of the water pump (Lecture XI) and that was as a contrast to the magnificent fountains of France.

Soane was taken into Dance's office in 1768, when he would have been 14 or 15 years old. He is likely to have helped with Newgate and, when practicing on his own account, helped again with the reinstatement of the Gaol. The first of his Notebooks at the Soane Museum has an entry under 15 July: Began the Newgate Business, Thursday May 30t^h 1781; and his Ledger (accounts book) A also at the Soane Museum has an entry for 1781: Assisting M^r Peacock to make the / descriptions and Estimates of the / Great Quadrangle of Newgate abt: / 20 days --- 21..0..0. Kalman (p.319, n.9) suggests that Soane contemplated introducing on the Princes Street elevation of the Bank of England a blank facade with heavy bossed rustification similar to that in Dance's first design ([SM D4/4/1]) but 'for a wall that was impenetrable from without rather than within' (SM Vol.60, 179-181, dated November 1791).

A report on Newgate Gaol and Giltspur Compter, 1815
In 1815 a Report from the Committee of Alderman appointed to visit several gaols in England was published (copy at the British Library). It arose from a House of Commons Report of 9 May 1814 critical of the City of London's gaols including 'the very crowded state of the Gaol of Newgate' that by January 1814 held 822 prisoners.

The report began with a list of 35 prisons that the alderman visited including Bodmin, Reading, and York, Norwich and Chester Castles. The purpose of the committee set up on 29 July 1814 and 'accompanied by the Town Clerk, and Mr. George Dance the Clerk of this City's Works, as also Mr. John Addison Newman the Keeper of Newgate' was related to the conversion of Newgate to a Criminal Prison and the Giltspur Street Compter as a House of Correction. One conclusion was that, admirable as some of the prisons visited were, 'those benefits, which, we could not but admire, are totally inapplicable as regards the Gaol of Newgate and the intended House of Correction ...such a Gaol would occupy a space... of not less than thirty acres... wherever practicable, an external wall, so as completely to insulate the Prison, is above all things to be desired: But... this cannot be effected either at Newgate, or the intended House of Correction in Giltspur Street, on account of the great difficulty of obtaining a sufficient space, and the enormous expense that would necessarily attend it.'

The committee's recommendations included 'That the Gaol be divided into day-rooms, and distinct yards, having arcades in each, for the benefit of air and exercise in wet weather, for at least six classes of Prisoners. That Warm Baths, as well as Cold, should be provided... also Ovens for fumigating and purifying [the] ... Clothes of Prisoners.... That circular apertures of open iron-work, of at least four feet diameter, should be made through the several floors, from the top to the bottom of the Prison, for the purpose of a thorough ventilation. That the Shutters for the Windows should be constructed as to admit air and light; and at the same time prevent the possibility of the Prisoners looking into any other apartment, or into the yards of the Prison. That each prisoner should have a separate Sleeping Cell. That separate Day-cells for Labour should be constructed, distinct from the Sleeping cells; as also cells for the exclusive confinement of refractory Prisoners.... That in the Debtors' Prison... apartments should be constructed and exclusively appropriated to the reception of Friends and Visitors of the Debtors. That the Chapel should be so constructed, that each separate class of Prisoners, as well male as female, may enter... without being seen by those of any other class.... That Work-rooms, as spacious and convenient as the nature of the building will admit, and separate Working-cells, should be provided for the use of those confined in the House of Correction.'

The six classes of prisoners were: capital felons; simple felons and first offenders; criminals under sentence of death; misdemeanors and persons waiting sureties; misdemeanors of the grossest kind; children. Other recommendations covered food, cleaning, washing, abuse of alcohol, that irons should not be used on those confined for offences of a minor nature, that iron bedsteads with bedding should be provided for criminals as well as debtors, and that a laundry be established.

Dance's contribution included some 'observations' that revealed the progress of penal reform: 'The building should be incombustible and have a surrounding wall with a space of from 15 to 20 feet between the habitations or apartments. The geneal distribution should be of such as to afford complete separation and classification. Complete ventilation and exclusion of cold and damp night air. Ample supply of water, and complete drainage. Means of constant and free inspection, by the form and situation of the principal buildings. Ample and convenient rooms and yards for working and exercise. Spacious infirmaries or Hospitals detached. Foul wards for infected Prisoners, and others for the convalescent. Separate cells for sleeping. Turnkey's lodges, and rooms for examination previous to admittance. Day-rooms with glazed windows and fire-places. Arcades for shelter and exercise. A convenient Chapel. Gaoler's house in the centre of the building, for general inspection. Wash-houses, with warm and cold baths. Pumps in the court-yards, and troughs for water. Provision for Prisoners' friends to visit them without mischief. Room for Visiting Magistrates...[all this] ony applicable to situations where ample space and funds can be provided.'

Related to the Report [on] several gaols in England is a letter from Dance to Soane (SM Archives 14/18/17, among a bundle of letters and drawings given by Miss L.R.E. Walne in 1984) as follows: My dear Sir / Being very desirous to procure the plans of / the new Gaol Clerkenwell w^ch were published soon / after the erection of that building can you inform / me if they are to be had for love or money - if you happen to possess a copy of them and will do / me the kindness to me let me have them for a little / while you will do me a great favour and I / will return them with many thanks / I am my Dear Sir / with great regard / most truly yours / Geo: Dance / Upper Gower Street / June 19th 1815.

Colvin gives Samuel Ware (1781-1860) as the architect of the Middlesex House of Detention at Clerkenwell, 1816-18. There are Soane drawings for the Clerkenwell Sessions House dated May 1821 (SM 37/3/30, 32-33) but none at the Soane Museum for Clerkenwell Gaol.

Later history
A 'Plan / for the construction of / 3 Criminal Courts & House of Detention / on the present site of / Newgate Gaol' was made by J.B. Bunning, City Architect, and presented to the Prisons Committee on 31 January 1856 (CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plan, No.477). This was rejected and a 'Design for the Formation of / a Cellular Prison / within the Walls of Newgate / planned so as to avoid any interference with the / external Architecture of the Gaol ...' was agreed on 29 June 1857 and carried out (CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plans, No.478). Newgate was eventually demolished in 1902 for E.W. Mountford's Central Criminal Courts. One of the entrances with shackles above it and a grid-like door is preserved in the Museum of London. The 'old toll bell which tolled at Newgate for every execution between 1775 and 1902' is kept at Madame Tussaud's, London.

LITERATURE. J.-N.-L. Durand, Recuil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre, anciens et modernes, 1799-1801, pl.28; J. Britton & A. Pugin, Illustrations of the public buildings of London, II, 1828; R Blomfield, 'The Architect of Newgate' in Studies in architecture, 1905, pp.73-90; J. Summerson, 'Newgate Gaol: catalogue of drawings in Sir John Soane's Museum', Architectural History, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, II, 1959, pp.42-9, [SM D4/4/1] (part), 5-8, 10 (part), 13 and 24 reproduced; J. Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830, 4th ed., 1963, p.274; H.D. Kalman, 'Newgate Prison', Architectural History, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, XII, 1969, pp.50-61; Stroud pp.97-107; Kalman pp.90-101; R. Evans, The Fabrication of virtue: English prison architecture, 1750-1840, 1982, pp.109-10; British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects, Early printed books 1478-1840, vol.1.1994, pp.438-40; D.Watkin, Sir John Soane: enlightenment thought and the Royal Academy lectures, Cambridge, 1996.

OTHER SOURCES. Corporation of London Records Office; Guildhall Library, Manuscripts Department; Royal Institute of British Architects Library and Drawings Collection.

Group

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